While there are a growing number of Lightroom blogs and podcasts offering excellent free video tutorials (which is great!), but you may be one of those people who just want to go through a soup-to-nuts video course on using Lightroom, well there are three sources I recommend checking out:
- Kelby Training – From the “fine, fine people who bring you Photoshop User Magazine”, Layers magazine, Photoshop User TV, Photoshop World, and the top selling books on Photoshop and Lightroom comes a subscription based video training offering that is out of this world. You can purchase either a monthly or yearly subscription (NAPP members get a discount) which gives you access to everything in their online arsenal, which is being added to all the time. At the time of this writing there is only one Lightroom course (Photoshop Lightroom Basic Training) from Matt Kloskowski, which is great for anyone looking to get up and running with Lightroom quickly (more are on the way). Don’t worry though, there is plenty of great Photoshop and Photography training to keep you busy while you wait. You can sample the first three videos from every course, so go check it out.
- Lynda.com – I had the great pleasure of meeting Chris Orwig when I worked the Lightroom track at Photoshop World in Vegas last year. Chris is a guy who is just as passionate about photography as he is about teaching, and it shows. He has two Lightroom titles on Lynda. The first is a Lightroom Essentials course which will not only teach you what you need to know to get started with Lightroom but will inspire you to step away from the computer and grab your camera, and the second is a follow up that covers the new features added in Lightroom 1.1. Lynda offers monthly and yearly subscriptions which puts their entire catalog at your disposal. You can also try-before-you-buy as each course offers some free videos to check out.
- Luminous Landscape – If you ever wanted to invite two Lightroom experts, who also happen to be top-notch photographers and print masters, over to your house for over 5 hours of training, then look no further than Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe. This training, in the form of 9 downloadable quicktime files, walks you through every aspect of the program. These guys know Lightroom inside and out. The benefit of downloading these files is that you don’t need to be online to watch them. They even provide iPod versions. The videos are well organized and populated with bookmarks to make it easy to skip around to the topics you want to hear about.